


Everything I Ever Wanted

by DreamsOfSleep



Category: New Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Baby Fic, Drunken hook-up, F/M, Unplanned Pregnancy, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-22 17:31:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11972211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsOfSleep/pseuds/DreamsOfSleep
Summary: AKA The Drunken Hookup AUFic inspired byMax Greenfield’s Fan Theory Exploder Vid, specifically the fan theory that, “Nick and Jess drunkenly hookup, and Jess ends up pregnant. The baby is a she, becoming the titular ‘New Girl.’”Canon divergence from 5x10 "Goosebumps Walkaway"





	1. Down

**Author's Note:**

> I hate what the writers did to dumb Nick down in S5 and S6, but I heard a fan theory that Nick wasn’t being dumb, he was just really drunk the entire time. It’s part of the canon that Nick has always had a drinking problem but it must have gotten progressively worse after he and Jess broke up. It must have been especially bad during the time Jess was away at jury duty because they had never really been apart like that (full-on no contact for over a month) and it forced Nick to confront his unresolved feelings about the breakup. So Nick might not have been dumbed down, he might have just been a guy who needed an intervention, a not-so-functional alcoholic trying to deal with his life through alcohol. His MO is “drinking to forget” so it does explain why it seemed like Nick had a personality change after Jess left for jury duty but returned to normal after Jess came back in the second half of Season 5. He sobered up after she came back.

Jess was gone and Nick was falling apart. 

He had been doing pretty well the first two weeks she was gone. Missing her but holding it together. He found productive ways to distract himself. He turned their apartment into an Airbnb to help pay for Schmidt’s bachelors’ party. He invited his cousin Bob and his wife Carol to come visit him in LA. He seemed to have hit a lucky streak recently and things were going really well at the bar too so he wasn’t strapped for cash like he usually was every month. As far as his life was concerned, everything was coming up Nick. He was finally becoming a fully functional adult for once in his life. 

_Nice lies he told himself to get through the day._

From the outside it looked like he was doing a good job of holding it together, but inside he could feel the threads of himself slowly unraveling. _God, he missed her._ They never really spent any time apart after they broke up like they should have, like they would have if they were regular, normal people. She had always been there in all the days afterwards, a permanent fixture in his life, even if they weren’t still a couple. He knows, he’s always known that this isn’t the way things were supposed to be. A part of him was still holding on to her. She was still occupying a part of his heart that she shouldn’t be in because they had broken up and they were both supposed to move on to find other people. How it was now was how it was supposed to have been. This was what his life was supposed to look like without her.

_He can’t call her up to talk to her when he’s having a bad day. No one else in his life would listen to him rant about something petty and inconsequential for half an hour like she would. She’s the only one that can make him see the silver lining when it feels like the whole universe is a terrible place and he's just an insignificant speck in it. He doesn’t have anyone else who understands about celebrating the small victories in life like hearing ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ come on the radio right as he finishes his shift or who gets those wonderfully weird things that happen to him like seeing a seagull in the backseat of a moving car._

_Mostly, he just misses her being there. You don’t really realize how much space a person takes up in your life until they’re really gone. He half expects her to be there sitting on the couch every time he pushes open the loft door and he feels that heaviness in his chest when she’s not. It always made him happy to come home to her after a long day. They never really hung out anymore after they broke up but sometimes when he came home from work she would be there watching TV late at night on the couch and he could pretend she had been waiting up for him. He would crack open a beer and she would slide over to make room for him and hand him a blanket just because she was Jess. They wouldn’t say anything but they would sit on the couch watching TV together and even though his life was still a mess, in those moments everything felt warm and perfect and he didn’t have to worry about anything because her presence there next to him meant everything would work out._

That feeling of loss, of delayed heartbreak, had been sneaking up on him this whole time and when it finally hits him, it slugs him right in the chest. Suddenly he finds himself looking at his life, at all these things he’s supposed to be proud of, and he just can’t see the point of it all. He’s watching all the other people in his life move on without him. He’s not growing up. He’s falling. He’s been falling for a long time. 

\---

It starts with a stumble. The Airbnb had seemed like a really good idea but of course he screws it up by having sex with one of their renters because she reminded him of Jess. Then he found out the reason Bob and Carol had been so eager to come to LA to visit him was because they wanted him to be their sperm donor. They wanted him to give them a family, the family he could have had with Jess if he hadn’t fucked everything up, and that sent him over the edge he had always been acutely aware was there ever since he and Jess broke up.

Hearing other people in his life talk about _the future and life plans and his hypothetical family with a wife named Maria and their 2.5 kids_ was like reliving his breakup with Jess all over again, all the stuff he couldn’t say to her then and he still couldn’t talk to anybody about now, that future life he wanted so badly but he knew he was going to screw up so he had to let her go. He wasn’t ready then and he didn’t know if he would ever be ready for that no matter how badly he wanted it. 

His life had been frozen to that exact moment in time when they had broken up. It felt like he was still standing there in the hallway across from her trying to figure out how to change the outcome of their relationship, struggling to find a way to take back the words or find something significant and monumental to say so they wouldn’t break up, trying in vain to find a way to save them. He could pretend he was doing better this year with the bar and everything but he knew deep down inside that he was still stuck in the same place in his life. He had thought it was because he was afraid of change or of growing up but that wasn’t it. He couldn’t move on with his life because he was still in love with Jess, even though he knew he shouldn’t be because _he_ had been the problem, _he_ was the reason they hadn’t worked out. He had to wake up every day and live with that fact. Their time was over, but she had moved on and he hadn’t. He was still the same guy living in the same apartment in the same life he had when he met her, still so in love with the girl across the hall he couldn’t see straight. He was right back to who he was then, too afraid to reach out for her and tell her how he felt, hiding his love from her so he wouldn’t scare her away and he could keep her in his life. 

\---

He was feeling all those scars on his heart being ripped open again and he couldn’t just seal all the bad feelings away like he usually could because he was still dealing with the fact that Jess wasn’t there. So two weeks after Jess left for jury duty he started drinking to forget, his go-to move trying to drown out all those voices in his head, and he didn’t stop.


	2. Blame It on the Alcohol

It was no secret that Nick liked to drink but he had never thought of himself as an alcoholic. He had a longstanding love affair with booze, but he always knew his limits. After every infamous bender, he always managed to find a way to crawl out of the alcoholic haze, clean himself up, and put himself back together again. Nick knew it never looked pretty from the outside, but this was his version of ‘taking care of himself.’ It was like pushing a fast-forward button to get through all the bad parts of his life until he could find something good again. He convinced himself it would be the same this time, even as the days started to blur together and he existed in an alcohol-fueled stupor where he couldn’t even remember half of the things he did or the things he said the day before. No one in his life said anything to him so he thought he must have been doing a pretty good job pretending to be normal. It was almost like a game. _Gambling with real stakes._ He had to keep himself in that space where he was so drunk that reality started to get fuzzy at the edges but not so drunk that he couldn’t go to work or hold a semi-coherent conversation.

He became preoccupied with finding creative ways to sneak alcohol so that he could keep drinking continuously throughout the day. He would dump Bailey’s into his morning coffee. He mixed vodka into cans of Red Bull and bottles of Gatorade so he could hide them in his room or in his car and drink without arousing suspicion. He’d go into the back office during slow periods in his shift to shotgun beers or down shots of whiskey so he would stay buzzed. He knew he was pushing it, crossing even the upper levels of his already high tolerance. But he also knew that if he stopped, he didn’t think he would be able to get out of bed until Jess came back again weighed down by the intense sadness and longing of missing her. He would just pull the covers over his head and just stay there waiting for Jess to come home again, falling into a depressive funk worse than after he and Caroline broke up. 

\---

Regular Nick watches his life from the third person for a while as Drunk Nick takes control of his life. Drunk Nick mostly spends his time eating Mexican food and being ultra-paranoid about conspiracy theories. He also thinks he’s a genius at fancy-fixing things, even though the things he fixes when he is drunk are way more terrible than even the things regular, sober Nick fixes by about two magnitudes. Drunk Nick still misses Jess a lot but he has a short attention span. It’s easier to distract him and make him forget about Jess for longer periods of time so Regular Nick can get through the day. 

\---

He doesn’t know what it says about his personality that no one in his life notices when he started being Drunk Nick all the time. He hopes it’s not because Regular Nick is that much of a mess that they can’t tell the difference. He chalks it up to everyone being in couples. _Couple blinders._ Winston can’t stop talking about his new partner Aly, who everyone but Winston can see that he is clearly head over heels in love with, and Nick has to live with Schmidt and Cece being all lovey-dovey with each other all over the loft now that Cece has moved in. Nick remembers when he and Jess were the same way. They barely left her bed when they got back from Mexico. He had been so happy in love then that he could feel it running through his whole body and he had to wrap himself around her so she could feel it too. They had created their own private refuge from the world all tangled up together in her sheets. A world that was entirely composed of _the intoxicating vivid blue of her eyes, their hands moving across the warm expanse of each other’s skin, his lips pressing against every soft bare inch of her, her need for him emanating in whispers and moans from her delicious mouth._ For that brief time, he had allowed himself to believe that he had finally found something good to hold on to in his life, that a guy like him was allowed to be happy, that he was finally able to love something without destroying it, the way he destroys everything else in his life that he touches. He downs another beer to erase those bittersweet memories.

He thinks if his friends were paying more attention, they would have held an intervention for him, for this drinking problem that has taken over his life. Alcohol has always been a crutch for a lot of things in his life but this time he knows he doesn’t really have a drinking problem. He has a Jess problem. He needs an intervention for Jess feelings that he is trying to cure with all this booze. Treating the inside with drinking alcohol seems to work for everything else in his life, but Jess feelings seem to be immune to. Even when his brain feels like it’s soaked, swimming in the stuff, he still can’t kill the part of him that Jess still lives in, the part of him that still loves Jess even though he shouldn’t. She has burrowed into his chest and taken up permanent residence there. The more he tries to chase her out, the further she burrows into his heart and refuses to leave.

At night, he lies awake in bed and imagines his love for her imprinted on every single one of his cells, entrenched so deeply into him the booze can’t erase it even though he still tries to. The booze dulls it, dulls the pain of not being able to do anything with all that love, but once he starts sobering up again, he still feels it there. 

\---

He thought he had gotten through this. Weren’t they “The Best Exes Ever”? They had successfully navigated all the minefields from being a couple back to being ‘just friends’ again. They lived together and went on dates and slept with other people right next to each other and it was exactly how it used to be before they started dating. There were no residual feelings of bitterness or petty jealousy between them. But then again, there wasn’t much of anything. _They made sure they were never alone together. They didn’t make up excuses just to hang out with each other like they used to. He was always the last to know about anything in her life, only hearing about important things that happened to her second hand from Schmidt or Winston. They were careful about not touching each other, taking back that easy physical intimacy that had grown between them over the last four years. That was worst of all. He never had to think about how he touched her before; she always let him. But it felt too loaded now. They both knew it._ They were ‘best friends’ in name only. Everything in the past two years since they had broken up had just been complete and utter bullshit. 

Maybe it was just bullshit on his part though. Maybe Jess liked the way things were now. He doesn’t really know what she thinks anymore. Maybe she didn’t really want to be friends after they broke up and she was just being nice, not wanting to push him out of his life in the loft after the breakup since he was here first and she knows he doesn’t deal well with change. Jess is someone who knows how to change and grow and adapt, unlike him. She’s someone who is able to separate things, hang on to her exes without making things weird or having unwanted feelings about them. One summer and he had probably already been out of her system, everything about him neatly labeled and packed away from her ‘boyfriend’ box back into her ‘friend’ box.

He should have moved out after they broke up. He needed time away by himself to process it instead of just sealing everything inside of himself and pretending nothing either of them did after the breakup affected him at all. If he’s being honest with himself, maybe he thought they would get back together again. He had been waiting for that open door that never came, hoping that given enough time and distance from their breakup if he was just _here_ , she would give him one more chance. But he knows that's not only it works. He's been through that door before and it had closed behind him. Life is really just a series of closing doors and sometimes once a door is closed, you don't get another chance to open it again. _He’s hurting himself by staying here._ And not only is he hurting himself, he’s also hurting her. He’s the reason Jess can’t find her Prince Charming because he always messes things up for her. All the guys she dates can feel the ghost of their past relationship every time they walk through the door. She’s perfect, the perfect woman, and he’s infecting her life with all his badness and she doesn’t even know it. She doesn’t even know it and he’s selfish for not letting her go just like he’s selfish about everything else in his life. He let her love him and he fucked up her life and he still can’t let her go.

The problem is he doesn’t know who he is without her. Who is he now minus one Jess? Obviously this mess of a human being who still can’t take care of himself, who still doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he’s going. Someone whose future is still a dark hole he can’t help falling down. He can see the way things are now is just the tip of the iceberg. He should stop drinking and deal with his life. His shitty, shitty life which he's created with his terrible life choices. But being a functional alcoholic still seemed preferable to that other alternative of having to face the reality of a future where everyone has left him and he ends up alone, still unable to change, still unable to love anything or let anyone else into his life. Hell, he’s living in the future now. He should have known it was at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. 


End file.
